What have I done, I wonder, that to me should have been decreed the love of two such women as Marie and that of Stella, also now long dead, to whom alone in the world I told all her tale?
I remember I feared lest she should take it ill, but this was not so.
Indeed, during our brief married days, she thought and talked much of Marie, and some of her last words to me were that she was going to seek her, and that they would wait for me together in the land of love, pure and immortal.
So with Stella's death all that side of life came to an end for me, since during the long years which stretch between then and now I have never said another tender word to woman.

I admit, however, that once, long afterwards, a certain little witch of a Zulu did say tender words to me, and for an hour or so almost turned my head, an art in which she had great skill.

This I say because I wish to be quite honest, although it--I mean my head, for there was no heart involved in the matter--came straight again at once.

Her name was Mameena, and I have set down her remarkable story elsewhere.
To return.

As I have already written in another book, I passed my youth with my old father, a Church of England clergyman, in what is now the Cradock district of the Cape Colony.
Then it was a wild place enough, with a very small white population.
Among our few neighbours was a Boer farmer of the name of Henri Marais, who lived about fifteen miles from our station, on a fine farm called Maraisfontein.